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The anniversary of September 11, 2001 in the U.S. represents many things to many people. When I do reflect on it, as I am now, it calls to mind a montage of images from my time in the city both during and after that memorialized day. My computer screen with instant messages from friends living in other states, asking for help locating their parents. A solemn, confused, traumatized city filled with posters of missing people. My church family and I, walking together protesting the wars against Afghanistan and later Iraq. Silent demonstrations shrouded in black with signs proclaiming, “Our grief is not a cry for war.” Derek, my friend with developmental disabilities that died years later from the dust and debris he had breathed on that day.

But beyond our personal memories, the primary purpose of commemorating this day is American myth-making. Although the pomp and circumstance dedicated to that day may not state it explicitly, the moral of this political story is that the only 11th of September worth remembering is the one in which Americans were attacked and killed; that the only noncombatants worth venerating are ours; that the only civilians that should never experience politically motivated violence from foreign hands live on this soil; that only people who hate freedom and democracy would dare strike at it’s main purveyors and perhaps chief of all that America is always, always innocent.

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